Tuesday was my day to leave early for the airport; I took the enormous duffel bag, which had been made one kilo lighter by Ray having taken the peanut butter we’d brought for a friend in Romania. A bus, an S-Bahn, and another bus did the trick.  The flight on Ukranian National was uneventful.  A limo picked me up at the Kiev airport, and took me to the Holiday Inn, by far the fanciest hotel we’d stayed in this trip. I repacked stuff slightly, and took a tote bag to Global Logic, where I spent about 32 out of the next 75 hours working with several of my colleagues, many of whom I had known only as e-mail addresses. They have old-school cubicles, but they are packed full of people. My 4×8 cubicle was shared with another guy; the three Pro Tools tech leads shared the next one, an 8×8 cube. Tuesday night, after working a few hours, we went to a fancy Georgian restaurant. Three of us split chacha, homemade Georgian grappa, as far as I can tell. Strong stuff, but the apple juice chaser dilutes it. We ordered lots of khachapuri, which is a bit like pizza with only crust and cheese, and bits of several other things.

Wednesday and Thursday I just worked. We ate around 5pm, one day in a little “health restaurant” in the building, and another with food delivered to the little break room steps from my cubicle. I worked on into the night, giving me a chance to communicate with my California coworkers.

Friday was a bit of a break. In the morning, three coworkers met me at my hotel and we went to Pirogov, a park outside of town with exhibitions of village building styles from the last several centuries from all of the regions of Ukraine. There were windmills (with non-pitched blades) which were like little houses which rotated on their pedestals; beehives in front of houses; a building with a circular horse treadmill which through gears turned a flour mill (gee, I guess that’s why they call it treadmill); lots of little houses that we could go in and see objects which might have been there. And a few actually operating churches. After a couple hours, we returned to work, and I looked into some bug reports and took some time and care to determine that none of them seemed to be a threat to shipping the next version of the program. 7pm rolled around, and a group of us convened on the roof for some privately brewed beer and Serbian-style burgers. After that, and after dropping off all my stuff at the hotel, the pub crawl began. A taxi took us to a pricey modern crowded bar, where I had a very nice concentrated blackcurrant drink. Later another taxi took us to a “hipster bar”, only slightly less crowded, where a DJ was just packing up; I had a Boulevardier. It seemed nice enough, but the leader of the group moved on to another bar which featured live music, here I got a pint of Ukranian beer. The music was mostly 80s covers, competently played; I wasn’t annoyed by any wrong chords. My cubicle-mate lived about a block from my hotel, so we walked back together. By the time I got to my room it was 4am.

Saturday I checked out, the limo took me to the airport, I checked in (checking in online while I waited in the shorter Bag Drop line), then got on the British Airways plane and sat in an exit row.  Arriving at Heathrow Terminal 5, they are very proud of the sheer massiveness of the place. They forgot to mention “massively long line for ALL PASSPORTS”; it took 25 minutes to get through it, which is about par.  I got an Oyster card, and took the Underground and a bus to our airbnb just off Brixton Road in south London.  After walking around Brixton Village, with tons of crowded little restaurants intermingled with closed farmer’s market stalls, I went up to meet Ray at Blackfriar’s where he arrived after landing at Luton airport at 11pm.

Monday and Tuesday were two more productive work days for me. Monday night we walked to Parkstern, a really excellent little local restaurant. They seemed to be featuring ceps, a large European mushroom. We ordered a main course of beef with ceps, and a menu for one with pumpkin soup, pork ribs, pork shoulder with ceps, and a lovely dessert, splitting it all as usual. Tuesday night we joined our friends Lindsey and Kevin at Transit, a hip eatery in Mitte which was basically a tapas place, but pan-Asian. Then we walked to the Clarchens Ballhaus, which had sustained damage during WWII. The front half had become a courtyard; the lower floor of the back half was a fully restored ballroom / restaurant / bar, and it was Tango night, with many people of various ages and genders dancing. We had a drink there, and then peeked at the upper floor, where they feature other dances, and dance instruction. This room had been left pretty much the way it was. The GDR showed little interest either in tearing these places down or fixing them up.

The rest of the week I gradually accomplished less and less. Wednesday we arranged to meet Philipp and his friend Betty at Kimchi Princess, a hip Korean eatery, and decided to walk there for exercise and to see more details than we’d see on a bus or tram. There was a shoelace crisis, and all the time padding we’d made got used up shopping for new ones. The main courses were all really good, though there were only five side dishes and they were all brown.

As we had been walking around town, we kept seeing posters advertising various art shows, and at this point we had a list of things we wanted to see. Thursday we attacked the list, returning to Mitte to see a Cindy Sherman show at the Me Gallery. She invents all these characters, most of them ugly in some way, makes herself up to inhabit them, and then takes photographs. She’s the ultimate selfie artist. At the gallery there was a fantastic exhibit of various collected objets from all over the world and several centuries, displayed as a Cabinet of Curiosities. Around the corner there was a gallery showing Joel-Peter Witkin prints, always a lot of fun.

For the last several years, we have had our eyes out for parodies of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and Grant Wood’s American Gothic. The mother of Ray’s college friend collected the former, and we’ve been continuing to look for them even though she’s sadly no longer around. A Stanford art professor emeritus collects the latter. One of the shows we’d noticed was “Botticelli Renaissance 2015-1445”, which was a show consisting entirely of works based on Botticelli (with many of his works as well) The Birth of Venus was the most often “referred to”. For us that was the can’t miss show of the year, and we spent the rest of the day there. We bought the 2 kg catalog to send home along with Sandro’s poster collage. After we saw the show, we sprinted through the permanent collection of Old Masters’ works.

We were on our own for dinner, and Google Maps recommended a Nigerian place not too far away. It must have recommended it to another group of Botticellians, since we were recognized when we arrived. It was delicious; there were many different sauces to have with ground yam (starch to be eaten with your fingers). We tasted our tablemates’ “bitter leaves” sauce, which turned out to be better than either of the things we actually ordered. Bitter leaves aren’t bitter. Next time. We returned to the studio and Thomas and Bibo were there, after a brief vacation on the North Sea after all the work preparing for the exhibition.

Friday we saw a few galleries we’d missed: a tiny show of Slavs and Tatars, and the “gay museum” (mostly showing time-based media). For dinner, Thomas took us to Schwarzwaldstuben, a Bavarian restaurant in Mitte, the third time that week we’d been on that two-block stretch of the same street. He’s apparently a regular there. It was quite good, especially the wild sausage. As we drove back he complained that “everyone in Mitte is young and good-looking. I hate it.”

On Saturday Lindsey and Kevin hosted a festive brunch at their amazing apartment with two large living rooms and a large dining room and a kitchen. I didn’t even see the bedroom. It rents for less than $1000 per month, and is in a great Kreuzberg neighborhood, not far from Tempelhof. Bibo drove us down there, quite a sacrifice on her part since she wouldn’t be able to drink mimosas. There were about 10 people there, besides us all thirtysomethings doing design or IT, mostly but not all US expats. Everyone had interesting stories and were fun to talk to. After six of the bubbly bottles had been consumed, we walked over to Victoria Park a block away, and learned what Kreuzberg meant: it’s a “berg”, a hill, located in this park, with a “kreuz”, a cross. At the top of the hill is a monument to the war that liberated Germany from Napoleon. The monument is like a church steeple with no church. Further down the hill is a larger wooden cross. The other two or three bubblies were gone by the time we returned. When we got back Ray and Bibo fixed a snack of the various vegetables in the refrigerator.

Sunday we’d arranged to spend with an old friend from college I hadn’t seen in about 40 years, who’d lived in the same big house on campus at Stanford. Bob and his wife Marion live in Potsdam, a city which was just outside the Berlin Wall. It has a large park with palaces that the court of Frederick the Great occupied; we toured them last year. This time we just visited Bob and Marion in their neighborhood Babelsberg, famous for having a large film studio. We walked around its a large park, with several little castles, next to a river, a scenic place to catch up on everything which has happened. Bob is a geologic researcher for the government, and Ray got to have yet another conversation about the chemistry of geology, in this case about tin deposits in Swaziland.

Early on Monday, Ray left for Romania. He’d packed up the poster collage the day before with other things we wanted to send back. Monday morning Thomas got out bubble wrap and cling film and tape, and did a super-good job wrapping it all up. Since he’d just taken his car in to get fixed (for some problem other than the fact that it is a deceitful diesel Volkswagen) he strapped the package onto his bike, and we rode to the DHL/Post office. They’d given us a quote for how much extra to pay for the 5cm of excessive width, but it turned out that only works for air freight. (Our gift of art thus became even more expensive.) We paid the fees, and sent it on its way. (The next step shown on the tracking site is “The shipment will arrive in the destination country.”)

Having enjoyed the little ride to the post office, I asked if it was OK to ride to have lunch with Philipp, about half an hour away. That was fine with Thomas, so I quickly learned most of the etiquette of riding bikes on Berlin streets, and how to recognize bike lanes. Philipp and I went for sushi so I’d still have room for a meal later in the day. After that, I was trying to decide where to go; Lindsey suggested Templehof, and that sounded perfect. Once I got there, it seemed a lot like Burning Man: a big flat space with people riding somewhat randomly on beater bikes. After awhile she met me for a drink: I ordered a rhubarb soda pop which I’d seen an empty bottle of earlier, it was delicious. We left just in time for me to get back before dark. After awhile, another SF ex-pat Quentin sent an email, and I found him and we had enormous burgers, and discussed the lives of Americans in Berlin.

Thursday I picked up a rental car (an hour on buses and S-bahn down to Neukölln, 45 min back to get Ray). We drove west, stopping by two World Heritage sites, according to our algorithm for what to see.

Fagus-Werk in Alfeld is a shoe factory, and was the first major architectural project by Walter Gropius, who founded the Bauhaus school of architecture. One minor distinguishing characteristic was that there were no structural supports in the corners of the building, so that the windows on each side could meet with only minimal frames. They had a ten-room museum there, but we were only able to get to about four of them before it became 4:00 and everything closed. Sigh, next time.

Then we raced up to Hildesheim to see the cathedral, which was open until 6:00. It is famous for having the oldest known rosebush in the world, climbing on the cathedral wall, known to be at least 700 years old. We also saw St. Michaelis, a cute church nearby.

There are various approaches to the restoration of buildings which have been destroyed by Allied Bombers or Nazi sappers or Taliban. You can put them back together just the way they looked at their prime — Old Town Warsaw was done that way — or you can leave them exactly as they were found, as with much of Hattusas and the Kaiser Wilhelms Gedächtniskirche, or you can restore them partway and indicate somehow the boundary between the ruins and the restorations. Often the restorations are undecorated but of the same color as the remaining artifacts. This is what has happened in Hildesheim, but it seems as if there wasn’t a lot left, so the effect is of blank walls with occasional old bits sticking out.

This is pretty much what walls looked like before the 19th century discovery of Ruins as a Profit Center. You would build your wall from bricks and cornices and capitals and stelae and busts and whatever was lying around from the city you had just conquered and that was that.

We headed to Bremen for dinner. Bremen has an incredibly cute town square, in the “build it back the way it was” format. The Old Town Hall was boarded up during the war and it and the main church survived pretty well although Bremen was 60% destroyed.

European countries have long used a credit card scheme called “chip and PIN”. Instead of signing a credit card receipt, you enter a PIN number on a small terminal. You never lose sight of your card; in a restaurant, the waiter brings tbe terminal out to you at your table. Until the last year, America has used the magnetic stripe, and made you sign a receipt. In the last year, they have put chips in the card, though chip readers have been slow to appear. In Europe, these cards operate in a “chip and signature” fashion, where the terminal reads the chip, but then prints out a receipt for you to sign.

In Bremen, we stayed at the “Motel 24h”, which used to be a Formule One. After 10pm, one must interact with a kiosk to gain entry. First, one must enter a code to claim one’s reservation. The code on our confirmation from Booking.com was not recognized as valid, and we had to press the “emergency” doorbell to get the manager to come down. She took the form and typed some stuff into her computer, then we saw the invalid code being typed by her remotely onto the kiosk, and then recognized as valid. Great. We took over from there and started inserting our “chip and signature” cards, and even our “stripe and signature” cards into the little reader. But none of them were accepted. Faced with having to find another place to stay and a cancellation charge, we pressed the “emergency” doorbell again; the manager came back down, opened the office, put our “chip and signature” card in her other reader, which printed out a receipt for me to sign. I think I actually have a Wells Fargo credit card which operates in “chip and pin” mode, but I forgot about that when selecting the ones to bring on the trip. Next time I’ll bring it for sure. In the near future, you may read the review on Trip Advisor, though this will scroll out of sight by next year. The Formule One logo was still shown on signs on the rooms and bathrooms, and they still promised that the toilets would automatically clean themselves. But I never saw any red lights indicating that was happening.

Our original plans for Friday were to go up to the beach at Dangast to see a statue. But Bibo told us that she grew up in Worpswede, an artist colony near Bremen, and we decided to go there first in the gloomy morning. It’s a delightful little place, with art museums all over the place. We bought a ticket covering four of them, and went to see what was there. This group of museums was featuring the work of three women born in the late 19th century, doing most of their work in the mid-20th century. The first was Ottilie Reylander, whose most striking work was done in Mexico from 1910 to 1927. The next featured Käthe Kollwitz, who made paintings and drawings and sculpture about worker’s rights and social justice, and whose work was suppressed by the Nazi government. The third featured Jeanne Mammen, who grew up in Paris but then moved to Berlin, drawing illustrations for fashion magazines. Her work was also suppressed, and became more abstract, closely tracking the styles of the day in her later years. We also visited the “Cheese House”, a dome-shaped wooden house with an amazing collection of stuff inside.

Then we drove to Dangast, crossing the inlet north of Bremen through a tunnel. Dangast has a little monument on the beach in the form of a square brick pedestal with a perfectly sculpted penis head on top. We got several pictures. But it’s a good thing we went to Worpswede: the sun came out in the hours we spent there, and shone on the monument. More importantly, the tide fell and was extremely low when we got there. The beach would have been under water if we had gone in the morning.

And then, the reason for the Bremen excursion in the first place: we went to Thomas Rentmeister’s opening for his “Hostal” exhibition in Delmenhorst, which he had been setting up the previous days. First we looked around in a room in a side building which had works on paper. The best was a wavy closed curve made out of the little shavings from colored pencils by a manual pencil sharpener. It’s a bit “Under The Bridge” or “Stairway To Heaven” to say this — it’s the unrepresentative work which gets the most downloads. Mostly Mr. Rentmeister works in whites and off whites.

Another case showed a large variety of labels cut off of various items of white clothing shown in another room. The main building had exhibits on two upper floors, and on the lower one a long presentation by the museum’s curator in German, which we didn’t understand and wouldn’t have even had it been in English. Art theory is not something you can just walk into. Cultural critics expect art and philosophy to be instantly accessible in a way that they don’t expect of medicine and quantum mechanics. There are probably some papers about this.

The show had a “hospital” theme. There was a structure made from rusty square steel tubes connecting the exhibit rooms. One part of it had five impossibly-short bunk beds. One room had a wall of white shelves, each with haphazard piles of white clothing and other white things. Some other Rentmeister signatures were there, like a cube covered with Nutella, and another one with Penaten. Some ceramic blobs, one in the shape of a snowman, were scattered around for comic effect. The food served continued the hospital theme, featuring delicious chicken soup and other snacks.

Saturday morning we checked out of the Motel 24h and drove to Dennis’ father Klaus’ house in Braunschweig, and immediately proceeded to Wolfsburg, where Dennis’ brother Thomas was celebrating his birthday. We had some tasty Thai food, and spent awhile touring “Phaeno”, the local discover-science museum. It had many exhibits made by a project of SF’s Exploratorium, most of which are also there, including a black and white tile optical illusion wall like in the Exploratorium’s bathroom. Highlights here included Ray’s hair on end thanks to a Van de Graaf generator, and a fire tornado. You don’t take your hand off a Van de Graaf generator to brush the hair out of your eyes, by the way, and then expect to put it back. I knew this already but it slipped my mind.

It turned out we missed the exhibition of old pinball machines, oh well. Klaus works at Volkswagen, so you can guess what a major topic of conversation was. We drove back to Braunschweig and had a large afternoon snack, then rejoined Thomas and Daniele and Sebastian at Braunchweig Im Flammen, a fireworks show at the local swimming lake (this time of year it’s too cold to swim). I hadn’t seen a local close-up fireworks show for a long time. It was quite nice.

Sunday we had a leisurely breakfast, and then headed to Goslar. The downtown was kind of cute, and was having a little Renaissance faire, with people in old costumes and food booths. The main reason for going there was the World Heritage Mine at Rammelsberg, where they had extracted several minerals from seabed deposits for hundreds of years. There weren’t any English Language tours at the times we had allotted for the visit, but we did walk around the exhibits. As we approached them, a man was standing there with his young son, and asked if we’d like to know anything. He is a mining engineer at a nearby mine, and knew everything about this one. He had a long conversation with Ray about the different ways over time the various minerals were separated from each other and from the rock in which they were contained. We probably could have left at that point, knowing everything, but we looked at the pretty rocks in one building (inside and amongst huge tanks), the cultural-historical exhibits in another, and the cute little Christo packaged mine car in a third. By the time we got the rental car returned in Berlin, it was 9pm, seemingly too late to do anything; we had Turkish food by an S-bahn station as we went back to the studio. When we got there we saw that Sandro had made two more pieces of poster art, one for us and one for Thomas. The mission for the week would be to figure out how to get the one for us back to California.

When we were planning the trip, I wrote to our friend Thomas Rentmeister in Berlin, and asked how one would go about finding a place to stay with a fast internet connection, so that I could do actual work. He said that he would be gone setting up exhibitions, and that we could stay at his place. It’s a fabulous warehouse/loft/studio space in the Weißensee area. We arrived, his girlfriend Bibo was there, as well as Sandro, an artist from Sao Paulo. Our friend Philipp came over as well, bringing a monitor for me to use for working. We stayed in Thomas’ attic bedroom, up a spiral staircase from his enclosed office area. The large space is somewhat austere: the kitchen is tiny, there isn’t a lot of furniture. But there is plenty of room to work, and plenty of light, and Thomas makes large art. Sandro was also spending the week working. He tears layers of accreted posters off neighborhood walls after the rain has softened the glue. Then he picks out the ones which best serve as backgrounds, or visual themes, for his pieces.

Sandro had come to Berlin because a customer wanted pieces made from German posters, and it was cheaper to bring him here than to send the posters and finished art back and forth across the Atlantic. It is, too.

Tuesday and Wednesday were work days for me and for Sandro. Bibo took a bus to join Thomas where he was setting up the exhibition near Bremen. After setting things up to use Avid’s European network connections, access was quite usably fast, and I was able to dive into the problems of the day. Tuesday night Philipp took us all to Zur Haxe, a fairly nearby Bavarian restaurant serving large plates of pork knuckles and potato dumplings. On the way home, Ray’s phone fell onto the backseat of Philipp’s car. I discovered this using Find My iPhone; it was very sweet of him to drive it all the way back. We could have got it tomorrow, but everybody acknowledges now that phones are more important than children, not to leave in the back seat of somebody’s car.

Wednesday Ray and I walked to the corner store, picked up some sausages, and Ray fixed dinner for us all, using up some of the vegetables lying around the house. Sandro had a deadline of Friday to deliver two pieces to a German collector, and realized he really needed to work all night to get them done. When we woke up Thursday, there they were: posters, dimmed by wax, with painted figures in the foreground.

We spent the weekend with our Munich friends Dennis and Paulina who will get married in Sao Paulo in November. On Saturday we went to the Oktoberfest grounds about the time it opened. Fireworks at noon, the moment the mayor taps the keg, somewhere in the crowd. The newspapers said it took him two whacks with whatever ceremonial Gold-spike hammer he uses.

There were horse-drawn carriages, one for each beer company, which had been parading; we saw them exit as we entered. Oktoberfest was much more of a costume event than I expected. Many men wore lederhosen, much of it cutely embroidered, and checked shirts which I had no idea were a Bavarian thing. Women wore dresses called dirndls, definitely cleavage-friendly. Dennis said it wasn’t always that way, that the costumes really started happening much more about ten years ago. Another thing that immediately struck me when we entered is that there were lots of big modern rides: roller coasters, a drop tower, whirly things, etc. I guess they must be more fun when you are really drunk, in the way that a stomach pump is fun. When I went to Oktoberfest in 1978, I think I sat at a table outside and drank. No one told me that the real action happens inside the enormous tents, where there are bands, and much more massive concentrations of humanity. We went into some tents, but an unfortunate consequence of our arrival time was that all the tents were full, and everyone there had just started drinking. So there was no place to sit, and no turnover creating places to sit. We tried two or three tents; at one tent Ray and I were turned away for not wearing Bavarian garb, though I think the guy was suggesting we could try another door. That miffed me a bit, but whatever.

So we bailed, and instead went on a walk through Englischergarten, the large park near Dennis’ house. There was a biergarten there next to the Chinesischer Turm, or Chinese tower. A brass band was playing inside the tower, the first few tunes after we arrived from Broadway musicals. We ate a bit too much food, and drank a couple liters between the three of us, and then continued through the park. There was a place called “the Wave” where a fast-flowing river (haven’t seen any of those in California lately) runs over a concrete block, creating a wave on which surfers with short boards in wetsuits line up to go back and forth across the river, one at a time. If one does so well that they are there for, say, 30 seconds, other surfers will tap five times on their board as a signal that it’s time to dive downstream and let someone else have a chance. It was a lot of fun to watch although they were all in wetsuits.

In the evening we had dinner at Paros, a Greek taverna, giving us a chance to deliver a pair of lederhosen to Ian, a guy who’d grown up in our neighborhood. He had left them at his mother’s house and Callum had driven them to Seattle and given them to us. Before about 1635, this is how every civilian thing in the entire world moved from place to place. Not so long ago. Ian is currently job hunting in Germany.

For the six of us, we ordered the appetizer platter for four, which seemed like Korean side dishes, in terms of it arriving on about twenty small plates. We picked at a couple entrees as well. Then, at 11pm, the lights went down, and the waiter came around and started throwing napkins in the air, pounds and pounds of them. Everyone did a good job of scooping them up and throwing them back in the air, creating the proper festive atmosphere. Then the waiter poured shots of Ouzo for everyone, which increased the festive atmosphere further. Finally some folks started dancing on tables and that was festive enough.

On Sunday, after a leisurely breakfast, and a delightful Brazilian stroganoff for lunch, we returned to Oktoberfest, and this time amassed a larger group of Dennis’ ex-coworkers, making six of us. (I have heard a lot of grumbling this trip about the unpleasantness of working in the hierarchy of a German company. Dennis had just quit his job and started a project with a couple other people.) This time we headed for the Oide Wiesn (traditional fair), an area where they had vintage rides (e.g. bumper cars instead of drop towers) and vintage-themed tents. We went to the Velodrome, where people rode around a central area on various types of bicycles. One performer rode on an old-style bike with an enormous front wheel and a tiny rear one; a group of performers did tricks on bikes; and audience members rode on funny bikes which had pedals directly on the rear axle, or wheels on cams so the bike would go up and down as you rode. There were enough places to sit, and we got started on our day’s drinking. I ordered a liter of beer, but most of the others ordered “Radler”, beer mixed with lemonade, which is historically drunk by cyclists, who historically like bad things. After awhile we walked around the main fair, and headed to a tent where another coworker and his friends were, and sat there and drank for two more liters-worth of time. (We are basically teetotalers.) It was quite a lot of fun, and everyone being a bit drunk increased the number of people who wanted to take selfies with us. Some of them just came up and gave us a hug. It was near midnight by the time we left.

Monday we went to the train station, found our train, and re-learned how the reservation system works. You can buy a ticket, or you can pay a few euros more and get a reserved seat. We had unreserved tickets. It seems chaotic when you get on the train, but we soon realized that each seat was labeled with the range of stops for which it was reserved. We’d already settled in a couple of seats marked as reserved from Wurzburg on, and so there was a bunch of stress involved with wondering if someone would eject us when we got there, and where we’d go after that, because the train was quite full. Before we got there, the train just stopped in the middle of nowhere for about 20 minutes. The explanations given were only in German and contained the word “polizei”. Eventually it started moving again, and we realized we’d miss our six-minute connection in Göttingen Finally we reached Wurzburg, and thankfully no one claimed our seats. Maybe they were on a train with a longer delay, and missed their connection too. We waited 40 minutes in Göttingen for the Berlin train which left an hour later, which was delightully empty. We had a compartment pretty much to ourselves. We bought some transit tickets, and took a couple trams to the loft where we are spending two weeks (minus a side trip to the Bremen area), where we were greeted by a spaghetti dinner with tons of pesto.

Thursday we set the alarm for 5:30 so we could catch the 7am ferry to Elba, an island just off the coast of Italy where Napoleon was exiled, having to get by with only 600 men to keep him secure, and palatial villas to live in. Again, when we arrived, we went and redeemed our confirmation for the next ferry ticket. After being routed by Google into a residents-only area inside the walled part of Portoferraio, and chased out by residents, we parked elsewhere and walked around town, visiting the theater Napoleon converted a church into, and his winter home in town at the top of the hill. We drove to Villa San Martino, his summer home, and looked at that. Then we went on a delightful walk in the woods, up to the ruins of a windmill. We raced across the island to Rio Marina to catch our 4:30 ferry back to the mainland. Unfortunately, it was broken and wasn’t running. I don’t know if the guy who gave us the ticket earlier that morning knew it was broken — he sure didn’t mention it. So we had to drive back to Portoferraio and take the next ferry, which turned out to be a 6pm ferry arriving at 7pm, two hours late. Our hotel was in Ferrara, about 3.5 hours away, and there’d be no place to eat there when we arrived.

I looked at the map and found a town, San Miniato, just off the freeway with several places to eat. The first one we tried to find was on a segment of a road not obviously connected to the segment of it that we were on, and we ended up going somewhere else. If I’d used satellite view, I probably would have figured out what went wrong. But the other place we went, Pepenero, was a delightful restaurant where we decided to have the “Menu Toscano”, trusting the chef to surprise us with delicious things, which he did: a proscuitto and cheese plate, tortelli with rabbit sugo, and beef that he didn’t ask us how we wanted it cooked. All levels of cookedness were represented, from the rare spot in the middle, to the deliciously seared edges. A spot of espresso at the end of the meal enabled me to drive the additional two hours to Ferrara. The segment from Firenze to Bologna was quite grueling, with an endless stream of trucks in the right lane, and frequent segments of construction often with only one lane in each direction. But an amazing thing happened: at exactly midnight, I caught up to the beginning of a long string of trucks, and had the completed three-lane-each-way autostrade to myself all the way to Bologna. No trucks, not even any other cars. We made it to Hotel Daniela at 12:30am, where a guy had stayed up to let us into our room. Most places say that they don’t let you check in after midnight.

Friday we returned the rental car to Venice, and hauled our luggage to the train station. We had hoped to stash it and walk around with Ray’s cousin for 90 minutes or so, but the left-luggage room was “full”, and there was a very long line. So we took turns walking around, waiting for our 1:30 train. At about 1pm Ray noticed the train had been canceled. The lady at tourist information said, go to Trenitalia information (even though the train was Deutsche Bahn). At Trenitalia you take a number and wait. Around 1:25pm, I331 came up and two guys put their heads to gether to come up with the information that we needed to RUN with the luggage back across the bridge to Piazzale Roma, and find a “man wearing a shirt” who would escort us to some alternate transportation. The shirt was white and had only the smallest logo of the Austrian train service, but he could be identified by being at the center of a crowd of miffed Germans and bemused Italians. He and his assistant announced without explanation that we were to board a bus to Innsbruck, and then something else.

It was a somewhat slower ride, with views of the Dolomites on the autostrade north from Verona to Bolzano to the pass, which was not even that long a tunnel. More than the current devolution of 280, the stretch from Trento to Innsbruck is a contender for “world’s most beautiful freeway”. After some time, the conductor of the Magical Mystery Tour told us that we should board a train in Innsbruck. We found some good Japanese train station food, since the time of arrival to Munich was pushed back to near midnight.

This was the day before the start of Oktoberfest. I had visions of being on a local train loaded with soccer yobs singing the Horst Wessel Lied but in fact the clientele was half nervous middle class Germans and half African refugees. You may have read that Germany has recently reinstituted border controls. Nothing happened for a very long time but a trio of Polizei did walk through the car, saying nothing, and when we got to Rosenheim, an announcement came that we were to park there for a while and we should present our passports. So we got out our passports and waited for a long time and eventually even more Polizei — not border police like you see on established borders, but regular police — came on, and asked everyone whose skin was darker than a paper bag to show his passport. Most of them did not have one, and they were taken away for delousing. jk. They were all very polite and explained that they were going to be evaluated as refugees.

Nobody blond was asked to show a passport, nor even a ticket. Who knows how many Russian assassins and Bulgarian traffickers slipped past, unquestioned?

Later information: The government thought that the influx of refugees into Munich during Oktoberfest would stress the capacity of the city and lead to fights. There are other cities in Germany that need refugees, because their populations have so diminished that the sewer systems don’t even function properly for lack of flow. You can read stories on the Internet about cities, especially in the Eastern zone, tearing down apartments and converting them to parks. The refugees are officially being diverted away from Munich for the next three weeks. Still, it gives a bad impression when your border exists only for Negroes. White people in Europe still have all the international privileges of money.

We arrived late and had a misunderstanding with Dennis about whether he was going to meet us, or pick us up, or what. For some reason I thought he had a car. Oktoberfest was being anticipated by groups of young adult males who thought we looked like ZZ Top. More on that, later.

We arrived in Bastia at the northern end of Corsica around noon, and immediately set off to redeem our confirmation as an actual ferry ticket. We had done this before boarding in Livorno, but the agent in Bastia said we had to go to the ticket office, which was closed until 2pm. So we found an actual parking place, and bought some French stamps, cheaper than Italy by half, even accounting for the guy overcharging us by 4 euros. We were not making it easier for him, going through all his commemoratives to solve the linear programming diaphantine equation that is post card philately. This took about 90 minutes, so it was time to get the ferry ticket. We bought bread and had a pique-nique in a minor park, eating a prefab Greek salad and some finocchiona sausage we’d gotten in Massa Marittima. While we were eating, we got the most elaborate “ZZ Top” shout-out to date. Two bums, of the sort you clutch your camera to your side when they approach, paused about ten meters in front of us and played around with their cell phone: after a couple of minutes they did a “She’s Got Legs” walk to our bench, accompanied by the music they had just downloaded for the occasion.

We drove across the island to Ajaccio, where we stayed two nights. Our airbnb host met us at our car and helped us take our luggage to his place nearby. His tiny son pulled the suitcase. After the five-flight walkup in Livorno, we were thrilled to have a one-flight walkup. He also did our laundry, starting it a second time because he thought it still smelled. I will have to read his review of us on airbnb to hear his side of this. We found an excellent Corsican restaurant, Da Mamma, sampled the local sausage, figatellu, and had a fantastic plate of roasted goat and French fries. We call them French fries for a reason.

Corsica is an extremely mountainous island, the most mountainous in the Mediterranean. And so it’s inspiring to see people on bicycles, quite far from town, pedaling up the long inclines. We were mostly on paved roads, though some were quite narrow. One we took had a pair of women on roller skis, pushing themselves along with poles. I’m sure there’s a name for this setup.

Tuesday our mission was to explore prehistoric sites featuring menhirs, or standing stones. First we drove to Filatosa, the most developed park of that type on the island. There were little kiosks that played descriptions in one of four languages; there were lots of lights for nighttime visits. What there weren’t many of were menhirs: one with distinct carvings here, six mostly without there, and another five arranged around a large tree. There was a quarry area. There was much documentation, telling you what shapes and scrivening corresponded to what neolithic cultures, and the best current guesses as to the timing: 4000-1000 BC, about.

Next we went to a place Ray found by extracting the GPS location from a picture he found on Instagram or somewhere. We followed the Garmin down a series of diminishing dirt roads until we came to the smallest road yet, which was blocked with a pile of rocks. On a post on the surrounding fence it said, MENHIRS. We climbed over the rock and continued Garmin-walking an unmarked path through the chapparal which took a few turns but continued generally in the direction of the target lat-long and suddenly through the trees we saw several rows of standing slabs. There may have been 70 or 80 in a very small area. Some of them were standing in groups, a group of 10, a group of 8, a group of 3, etc.; many more had fallen over and were in piles. Still, it was exciting to find so many with so little documentation. They were undecorated, except for three on which you could faintly make out a characteristic “v” that many of the Filitosa menhirs had, which might be interpreted as a sword point. So they weren’t all of the earliest cohort.

Finally we went to the plateau of Cauria, which featured a walk to two small sites with 10 menhirs or so, and a third site with a dolmen, slabs of rock arranged as a shed or mausoleum or house of cards. We returned to Ajaccio, found a parking spot near the airbnb (a task made much easier by the tininess of the car), and went to dinner at a Sardinian restaurant on the port, having a plate of spaghetti with bottarga.

Wednesday we checked out of the airbnb and drove up the coast toward the Calanches of Piana, a World Heritage site in the national park which makes up about a third of Corsica. Just north of the town of Piana, the impression is of Zion National Park in Utah, red rock in pretty formations. A calanche turns out to be an inlet where rock has collapsed, and we stopped frequently to take pictures. The most frequently-photographed rock has a hole in it the shape of a heart.

When we were talking to the owner of the restaurant we ate in the last night in Venice, he told us about a friend on Corsica who runs a restaurant that we were driving past anyway. We found it and stopped, but it turned out it was closed on Wednesdays. So we continued to Bastia, where there was another airbnb (at which we could park in the yard), and a cute restaurant where the fish guy walks around in rubber boots and apron. Everything was quite good. We chose “loup” roasted with fennel seed; the waiter explained that this was seabass. Ray supposed that “loup”, wolf in French, indicated that this might be a fish renamed for marketing purposes: who wants to eat wolf-fish?

We found our guesthouse in Venice, not far from Piazza San Marco, around 11pm. Venice closes early. It’s hard to find any good food that late, and we survived with a mediocre calzone. “Mediocre” in Italy is still palatable.

Tuesday morning, we met Ray’s cousin John at the Biennale ticket office, located two minutes away. We bought tickets for our first showing for later that night, a double feature of “Sangue del mio Sangue” and “Anomalisa”, and John got tickets for all of us to see “Heart of a Dog” the next day.

The vaporetti, the water buses which take you from one island to another, are expensive. 7 euros per trip, or 60 euros for unlimited travel for a week. Since it seems we will probably return within the next five years, we decided to get 50-euro passes which let us use resident fares, 1.40 euros per trip. The line to do this, while not long, was very slow: several people in front of us were getting passes themselves, and each requires taking a picture, and the attendant has to fill in many fields in a form, and a contract has to be printed out. It gave us a chance to talk to the people in line, including Elena, an Italian art-history grad student from Rome.

In the afternoon we took it easy, recovering from our long travel the two days before. We then went to Lido, where the films are shown, and met John at the Golden Lion for Aperol spritzes and had some smoked salmon on potato salad as our dinner. The Golden Lion is a bar immediately across from the main red-carpet area where all the stars arrive for their films, in fancy Renaults driving very short distances. Two years ago they were Maseratis.

“Sangue del mio Sangue” is an Italian film about a man investigating the goings-on at an 18th-century monastery. His brother had committed suicide after an affair with an involuntary nun there, who they were trying to get to confess to having seduced a priest using the services of the devil (as if that were necessary). She was weighted with chains, pushed off a cliff into a river, after having been told that if she floated that would indicate her guilt, while if she remained submerged that would prove her innocence. Shortly after she failed to surface, they brought her up. She was next similarly threatened with fire. Ultimately they built a brick wall around her, where she apparently lived for decades. The film cuts to the present where a man with the same name wants to help a Russian man buy the abandoned monastery property. Everybody turns out to be vampires. There were never any clear lines drawn between the persecuters of the nun and the Russian investors, but you are bound to note the similarities, if any.

“Anomalisa” is the newest film from Charlie Kaufman, director of Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, etc. It is animated, and it soon becomes apparent that all characters are voiced by adult males, except for Lisa, who is an anomaly. (In fact, all but Lisa and the protagonist are voiced by the same person.) It’s a lot of fun, in a fugal way. Few image themes, many variations.

Wednesday we met John at his hotel, bought tickets for Thursday’s movies, and saw a few exhibits around town. The India/Pakistan pavilion had a cute digital mirror which showed us ourselves as we looked 30 seconds ago. It also had a room one of whose walls had five guys in Lahore, Pakistan talking to us. Unfortunately the sound was very bad and it was pretty impossible to tell what they were saying. They spoke good English. One was a dress designer.

The New Zealand pavilion had a display about the NSA, more informative than artistic. Political art has that problem. We saw a Sebastio Salgado / Illy exhibition with large detailed black and white photos of people making coffee sustainably. As we walked around, we ran into Elena, and talked for awhile. A small “shrine for girls” in a small chapel had a pile of saris from girls raped in India, a pile of hijabs from girls abducted by Boko Haram, and a pile of garments made by slave laborers. We took the boat to the Armenia exhibit on San Lazarro, where there is a monastery which has a printing operation, with a museum showing vintage typesetting equipment. Elena was there as well, and she came with us to have a spritz before our upcoming movie.

“Heart of a Dog” is an amazing hypnotic meditation by Laurie Anderson on love, death, and her dog. The trouble with seeing hypnotic movies when being jetlagged after long travel days is that I kind of fell asleep — I look forward to rewatching the movie when it becomes available.

On the ferry back we met a German woman named Tina, who tagged along with us to a pizza place way out in Cannareggio. We waited a long time to be seated, and Tina eventually said she was too hungry and tired to wait and went back to her hostel. We finally were seated, and the food arrived, one dish at a time, each after a long interval. It was quite tedious and late, but everything was good, especially the artichoke and prosciutto pizza.

Thursday we went to the Arsenale to see one of the two main art exhibitions of the Biennale. The theme is “All the World’s Futures”. There were several cute exhibits, but I’ll have to look at the pictures to remember what they were. We were there for about six hours, a grueling day. It also didn’t seem to have a lot to do with the future. The number of artists is depressing, who are still publishing position papers and getting grants as if Fluxus was the Dernier Cri.

We zipped over to Lido on the fifty-year-old water bus, and had sandwiches at the Golden Lion before heading to our double feature. “Remember”, a new film from Atom Egoyan, starred Christopher Plummer as a Holocaust survivor with Alzheimer’s. Like Julianne Moore in Still Alice, he had a letter reminding him of what he had to do, which in this case was instructions from Martin Landau telling him to find the guard who murdered his family at Auschwitz. It was pretty thrilling although the plot does not stand scrutiny. Scrutinize on your own time.

“From Afar”, a Venezuelan film, featured a middle-aged denture technician who picked up cute young guys and offered them money to come home with him and undress. It turned out that his motivation for doing this was nefarious rather than innocent.

Friday we saw several Biennale exhibits in Campo San Stefano, and then went to our afternoon movie. “A Copy of my Mind” was an Indonesian movie about a young woman who gives facials and a young man who uses Google Translate to make bad subtitles for pirated DVDs. She gives a facial to an important woman in a cushy prison, and steals a DVD which turns out to be a recording of a meeting where the woman facilitates bribes for government officials from real estate developers. Dangerous men come looking for her, but they find him instead. The two stars were in the audience, and we got to talk to them briefly.

Afterwards we went to Slip of the Tongue, a separate exhibition showing various cute things but if you are planning to go, be advised that “Piss Christ” is only there as a photo. No idea where the original is. After the evening’s spritz, we went to Gianni’s Pizzeria, a decent restaurant on the shore, and had delicious seafood risotto and grilled branzino, followed by a visit to the adjacent gelato place where we became somewhat of a sensation by eating one ice cream cone simultaneously. It was supposed to be a cup. Ice cream cones take much more concentration. There was a band playing rock and roll near by the whole time. As with the Gondoliers, their musicianship is at a high level and their choice of songs is blecch.

Saturday morning we saw an exhibition of very cute art. The thing which hooked me was a runway covered with little porcelain skulls which they invited you to walk on. There were also some wheelchairs made out of razor blades and paper clips, and some photos whose canvas was long and shredded and drooping in the center. Outside there were automated gamelans making a nice ambience. The man who made the automated gamelans apparently learned to program at a company in New York that makes sound effects for toys.

We then headed to the Giardini to see the other main art exhibition area (though first Ray headed back to the room to find his ticket, which had been misfiled as a souvenir). There we prioritized the national pavilions, dashing through the exhibition hall in the last half hour. The Great Britain pavilion featured Sarah Lucas, with two large balloonlike representations of Maradona, and several asses-and-legs with cigarettes in the hole. The Canada pavilion was fun, with a replica kiosk full of Canadian products, many of which were a bit out of focus. It also had a Rube Goldberg mechanism for sorting coins which didn’t sort them. The Australian pavilion was by far the best, in which Fiona Hall showed nests made out of shredded dollar bills, macabre cuckoo clocks, sculptures from loaves of bread, driftwood presented as animal sculptures, and elaborately fashioned sardine cans.

We picked up John and went to Al Mascarone, a small but very popular seafood restaurant a bit off the beaten path. The food was good: cuttlefish in black sauce, grilled sausage, and a creamy cod dish, all served with polenta. But then the owner wanted to have his picture taken with us, which led to complimentary shots of the best limoncello we’ve ever had, and an herbal amaro, and more pictures of us taken standing behind the bar.

Sunday we checked out early, and dragged our luggage through the empty streets to the Hertz office. We got our tiny Opel “Adam Rocks” stylish car with a wimpy engine, black with a white top and brown leather seats, and headed west. We stopped in Siena; I’d visited there for a day in 1979, but I’d completely forgotten everything about it. It has an amazing plaza shaped like a shell and sloped as an amphitheater. They race horses there in a festival. Fortunately there was no festival and parking was easy, when you found a parking meter that wasn’t broken. The cathedral has distinctive black stripes on its white marble in the style called “ablaq” from Syria to Andalusia. I don’t think Siena was ever Saracen, though. There were long lines even to find out how much tickets cost.

We drove on twisty little roads through the hills to Massa Marittima, where the celebrated mural we’d failed to see in 2005 because it was being restored, could now be seen through a window. The mural was discovered only very recently, and features a tree whose fruit is penises.

From there we drove to Livorno, found our airbnb and a place to park, with some effort — if you make the wrong left turn it could take ten minutes to get back to where you were. We ate some hearty cacciucco (a seafood stew), and went to sleep early. We got up early, and found our four-hour ferry to Corsica which we are on presently, along with our cute little car.

Thursday was a perfect day of relaxing. We spent it at Blue and Louise’s place in Kirkland, joined by Howie and LeAnne who flew in from Boston for the festivities. The house is on the shore of Lake Washington, with its own little dock and boat, and is two blocks away from Juanita Park, which has turtles and herons and hundreds of ducks. Nobody could tell us who Juanita was. She figures in many roads and business names, though. We walked around in the park, and then walked around in downtown Kirkland after having Thai street food at Isarn, a popular local spot. I don’t know how Thai street people afford those prices. Maybe Blue pays for them, too. The promised crowds didn’t really materialize, though — everyone was at Burning Man.

Friday was a perfect day of working. Ray drove to see a friend recovering from a stroke, and most of the others went to the new Chihuly glass museum by the Space Needle. So I was able to use Blue’s nice fast Internet to fix several bugs, and even to update the source code. Louise fixed delicious salmon with a sauce invented by Dean, and a fruit tart.

Saturday was a perfect day of celebrating. We picked up Kent at the train station, our friend David met us there, and we had dim sum nearby. Harbor City Restaurant is OK but they don’t offer their good stuff to foreigners. Next time we go there we will be more aggressive about ordering. We drove to the wedding venue, and strolled around the south end of Lake Union. We passed a group of formally dressed guys in kilts posing for pictures, who turned out later to be the groom party for the wedding we came up to see. We checked out the Historic Boats and the Wooden Boats; one of the historic boats was the 1904 lighthouse boat Swiftsure, with two beacons helping sailors find their way several decades ago. It is currently undergoing restoration: you can buy a bolt or a plank to help and they will put your name on it, at least conceptually.

Then it was time for the wedding, which took place in a church/coffee house. The church was not particularly denominational; there were no crosses or anything. The wedding was very religious, but mostly the “God loves you” variety instead of the “you must love God and hate all these other guys or else”. Katie and Andrew met in Scotland, where Katie was attending seminary school, and was some kind of Christian camp counselor to Andrew. They waited a respectable number of years before having a public relationship. Andrew is probably one of the most bubbly enthusiastic people I’ve ever met — the whole wedding was about fun and games, which I hope their marriage turns out to be, all.

It turns out that all the dances that Baby Boomers did in 4th grade P.E., when it was raining, were Scottish wedding dances, and we all should have paid attention.

Sunday began a brutal and imperfect day of traveling. We dropped off Kent, and whiled away a couple of hours at the Chihuly museum, and visiting our friend and erstwhile neighbor Callum. At 4:30 PM we began a 7-hour flight to Reykjavik, with a 1-hour layover; then a 3-hour flight to Gatwick with a 6-hour layover. The first two segments were on Icelandic, a quite decent airline compared to easyJet, which provided the 2-hour segment to Venice. We got up at 7:30am on Sunday, and it is now 1am on Tuesday.

After hauling our luggage across Venice because we were too proud to spend 7 euros each on a vaporetto and we couldn’t buy the five-year passes in the middle of the night, it was thrilling to say to the lady where we are staying that we will be here for six nights. A week of no airplanes or cars, only boats and lots of walking.

Aside from some napping on the plane, we have been up for 32 hours. So I will conclude this post and get some sleep.

Our plane landed at the Seattle airport at 5:30 on Monday, and we went to get our rental car (Dave got the car, Ray got the luggage, for efficiency). The reservation printout specified “Generic Car or Equivalent”. It’s a Chevrolet Sonic, your basic tiny four-door hatchback too small to hold the big duffel bag, the small suitcase, and the backpack all in the trunk, so we will have to avoid dangerous places. But it has cruise control, a backup camera, several speeds of intermittent windshield wipers, and USB audio, all features you wouldn’t have found on a generic car even two years ago, so it’s pretty nice. We left the airport at 6:30 with trepidation about making our 9pm-be-there-30-mins-early ferry reservation. But with the carpool and express lanes we were able to zoom through downtown Seattle and reach the ferry at 8:04pm, giving us time to have a bit of S. E. Rykoff prefab at the little ferry-dock cafe. The area between our car and the cafe was briefly closed to quarantine an international arrival from Canada, but we got onto the ferry just fine.

When we arrived at Lopez, our hosts Randy and Karen, friends from Menlo Park with a summer home on Lopez, greeted us with a crab they’d caught that day, perfect tomatoes they’d brought from Menlo Park, and fresh French bread from a local bakery. Yum.

Tuesday was spent watching the red-breasted nuthatches and chestnut-backed chickadees and downy woodpeckers at their feeder, and the rabbits out on the field they’d cleared to create a beautiful view of the sound. Later in the day, a humane cage arrived, which Randy set up with carrots. The rabbits didn’t seem interested. Our friend James came down on his boat from Crane Island, about 20 minutes away, and he and Randy spent much of the afternoon talking about shrimping, construction, and island life. Meanwhile, Karen and I assembled a BRIMNES bed from IKEA for their “chalet”, which had ingenious interlocking slats allowing its use as a single or double bed. Randy grilled some delicious lamb chops from Horse Drawn Farms, and took James back to his 20 foot aluminum fishing boat.

Wednesday we drove onto the 10:45 ferry back to Anacortes, and from there onto Whidbey Island. Deception Pass at the north end of the island is quite scenic. We visited Ray’s cousin Gail at her wine shop, then proceeded into Seattle to while away some time with shopping, have dinner with my step-nephew Aaron, his wife, and young children, and crash at my college friend Jeff’s apartment.

Thursday morning we arrived in Kirkland, where we will hang out with other wedding guests for the next three days. As we found ourselves driving our rental car across the Lake Washington bridge, we worried about the unconscionable fees we would be charged; a phone call to Dollar revealed that there will be a $10 administrative fee covering the entire week-long rental, regardless of how many crossings we make — that was a relief, and an improvement over how rental car companies used to treat you even three years ago.